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Movies that allow you some breathing room

Jim Emerson

View image Ramin Bahrani on the set of “Chop Shop.”

Ramin Bahrani’s first two features, “Man Push Cart” and “Chop Shop,” live and breathe like few other films these days. (That’s why they’re two of my favorites of the current century.)

In an interview at IFC Blog, Bahrani gives a beautiful description of the kinds of movies he values — and, in the process, indicates what makes him such a fine filmmaker. Of course, I also happen to feel the same way about movies, so no wonder I like his so much:

Film is really 24 frames a second in the present, and I realize when you leave certain gaps, it allows space for the viewer to enter the film. That requires a viewer who wants to be engaged, who wants to have an emotional connection to a film, which should not be confused with films that elicit emotions like weeping and whatnot. You watch a certain movie, and the director puts you in a headlock through ways of dramaturgy, music, camera moves and excessive acting. It hits certain synapses in your brain and makes you cry, then you leave, and the next day you’re having a hamburger and you don’t really remember what the film was. Despite that those are the kinds of films that get lots of accolades and attention, it doesn’t attract me as a person nor as an artist. I’m more interested in the ones — because of your participation — [that] seep into you, and two months later, are still a part of you. I don’t know if I’ve accomplished this, but it’s what I’m striving for.What he describes — that space that allows the viewer to enter the film — is a quality I particularly treasured when going through “No Country for Old Men” with the audience at the Conference on World Affairs last week. Although the first time you see it you’re aware of pulse-pounding tension, suspense and unforseen eruptions of violence, the movie is really full of breathing room. Long wordless sequences encourage you to get inside the heads of the characters and see things through their eyes, to experience what they’re thinking and feeling moment by moment: the opening sequence (which I played once without sound so we could simply look at the progression of images, then see and how they play off of Ed Tom’s voiceover); Lleweylyn following the trail of blood to the two trees in the desert; Llewelyn methodically assembling the tools he will need to place the satchel in the vent; Chigurh tending to his wounds in the motel bathroom…

Sick days

Jim Emerson

Wow, am I sick. Barely strong enough to stand up. I was standing in line at the pharmacy yesterday and the next thing I knew I was waking up on the floor, with my head spinning. All I can do is sleep through it…

Opening Shots: ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’

Jim Emerson

View image

From Jonathan Pacheco, Anna, TX:

Seemingly too easy of a choice, this film’s first shot meets your criteria perfectly. After a slightly creepy overture, we are blessed with shot of a barely visible moon. It slowly moves down as the earth rises above it, and even more distant, the sun rises above the earth.

All of this happens as “Also sprach Zarathustra” beams in the background, a song and tone poem based on a book that spoke about the journey in the evolution from ape to man to superman. Already, Kubrick is telling us exactly what will happen in the next couple of hours with just the music. The visuals are telling us exactly how his film should be approached: as a slow but massive epic, a film with concepts and visuals that should be pondered and revered, much like one is awed when looking up at the heavens. As an added bonus, the final shot in the film uses the first shot and takes it to the next level.

JE: Right you are, Jonathan. Kubrick composed his films with a thoroughly musical technique unlike any other director I can think of. (I’ve said it before: “Eyes Wide Shut” is ridiculous if seen as a straight narrative [it is, after all, based on a “Traumnovella” — or, “Dream Story”]; it’s magnificent when you look at it as a musical composition, using imagey the way musicians use sounds — thematic statements, colors, tempos, structure, repetition, development, variation…)

When we see the image of the planets and the monolith in alignment at the beginning of the film’s last movement (the psychedelic star trip into inner/outer space), we have that momentous sense that this is the climax of the picture, and it could take us anywhere — even if we don’t understand exactly what’s going on. And then, in the last few moments of the film, the spherical, planet-sized Star Child drifts into view…

I saw “2001” at the Cinerama Theater in Seattle when I was 10 years old. My life has never been the same since. Kubrick finds expression for the mystery and awe of being alive in this universe, at this time, by invoking images of the unimaginably distant past (“The Dawn of Man”) and the unimaginably near future (“Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite”).

Moments Out of Time 2007

Jim Emerson

View image Matt Damon and Julia Stiles scope out the situation in “The Bourne Ultimatum.”

Kathleen Murphy and Richard T. Jameson present their much-anticipated annual list of indelible memories-at-24-fps, Moments Out of Time, at MSN Movies. They’ve been sifting through the fragments of movie-time for these shining moments for many years, beginning in Movietone News and continuing through the 1990s in Film Comment.

Beginning when I was in high school, I would read through them religiously, looking for moments I’d treasured, too — or maybe even ones I hadn’t spotted or properly appreciated. Then I’d re-read, again and again, as if I were holding gems to the light and examining them through a magnifying glass, for the sheer pleasure of how they caught the rays. I’d pore over every turn of phrase, teasing out the meanings, even for the movies I hadn’t seen with my own eyes (yet).

Here are a few of my favorites for 2007:

In “Ratatouille,” the remembrance of things past courtesy of the eponymous dish: the critic’s flashback to childhood

When Bourne (Matt Damon) wonders why the CIA operative (Julia Stiles) who once set him up is helping him now, she answers with what passes for a declaration of love in the killing environs of “The Bourne Ultimatum”: “You were … hard for me.” …

In “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” the pebbles sliding away from the vibrating rail as Jesse’s boot rests there, waiting to stop his last train

Leaving her friend to wait out her abortion, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) attends an obligatory birthday party in “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.” The camera holds and holds as she sits frozen, claustrophobically hemmed by babbling guests, until she and we nearly explode with tension

The first getting-to-know-you-and-your-music duet in “Once,” one of the purest distillations of rapport ever

In “Starting Out in the Evening,” confronted by a redheaded beauty (Lauren Ambrose), the elderly gentleman (Frank Langella) involuntarily covers his face with his hand — to hide his age or to shield his eyes from her bright heat

Night birds: Chigurh, the raven, and the gunshot reverberating off the otherwise deserted bridge, after which the two bend their separate ways in “No Country for Old Men” …

“There Will Be Blood”: Killing God in a two-lane bowling alley: “I’m finished.”…

Hungry for more? Devour all of ’em here.

TIFF 2007: Casa of Horrors

Jim Emerson

View image Belén Rueda revisits “The Orphanage” of her youth. Or is it the orphanage that’s revisiting her?

As I was leaving the theater after watching Juan Antonio Bayona’s “The Orphanage,” still in the movie’s thrall, I thought for a moment that maybe I’d seen my favorite of the festival. It was only the second film I’d seen (and the movies ahead included the Coens, Cronenberg, Rohmer, Herzog, De Palma, Rivette, Greenaway, and who knows how many other big names), but I figured this had to be a good omen. Because in that moment I believed it to be possible — and if movies mean anything, they renew and inspire hope for the medium itself.

Guierrmo Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” was my favorite film of last year’s fest — and, as it turned out, my best picture of 2006. “The Orphanage,” produced by Del Toro, isn’t the seamless masterpiece that movie was, but it’s another strong, dark fantasy-fable and horror movie about mothers and children — that is absolutely made for adults and not for children. I’d venture to say there are more goosepimply moments and well-earned jolts in this picture than in your average year’s worth of commercial shockers. And yet, it’s also the only horror film in recent memory that brought me to tears. (The last one may have been Nicolas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now” — but that was nearer the beginning of the movie.)

View image Child’s play.

“The Orphanage,” as the title suggests, is an Old Dark House ghost picture (haunted by “The Haunting” and other shadowplays), with “Peter Pan” at the center and the specter of Roman Polanski repeatedly glimpsed around the edges, as if in tricks of peripheral vision. A ghastly face contorted into a permanent scream invokes “The Tenant” (and the open jaw will return in another horrifying image); a woman alone in rooms that play tricks on the mind, recalling “Repulsion”; a shot peering around a corner that, like the famous moment from “Rosemary’s Baby,” had me leaning to see what was in the blackness around the bend.

The revealing camera movement, in which you anticipate the sight of something (awful) beyond the edge of the frame, is the film’s signature. You know Bayona has gotten under your skin when Laura watches a 16mm silent home movie of what we’re told is a boy with a deformed face. We see the child from behind in an underlit room, studying at a desk. The hand-held camera slowly moves up behind him, but all we can see is the back of his head, so that we both dread the reveal and can’t wait for it. That’s the essence of suspense, and it’s a standard trick in the thriller repertoire. It just happens to be exceptionally well done here. And although I’ve touched on a half-dozen movie references already, it’s not because “The Orphanage” goes through the usual motions of offering shout-outs to its influences. They are well-absorbed here. (Oh, and did I mention “The Descent or “Dead Calm” yet? Think of the mothers driven to psychological extremes in those movies…)

Laura (Belén Rueda, from “The Sea Inside”) plays a fiercely devoted mother, raised in the institution of the title, who returns to the decrepit building with her husband and son. The boy begins to draw away from his parents in favor of new imaginary playmates he discovers in and around the house — and the beach cave beneath the lighthouse that can be seen from his bedroom window. Or, maybe, it’s they who discover him.

All due respect to “The Sixth Sense” (which I think is a nifty movie), but this isn’t exactly, “I See Dead Children.” “The Orphanage” takes its characters to the deepest, darkest places imaginable and dares them to fight their way back. There’s a distinctively Spanish/Mexican sensibility at work here, in which the gruesome realities of loss and death and decay are acknowledged in the open, a part of life as it is lived, and there are no guarantees of a fairy-tale Happy Ending for anyone. That’s because, as these cultures understand in their bones, the genuine, non-Disnified fairy tales don’t necessarily have happy endings.

Rueda’s performance is fearless and ferocious. Laura’s own orphan past returns as a deadly children’s game, a test to see how far she’s willing to go, how much she’ll risk, for her child. In some respects, her journey is not unlike the otherworldly plunge JoBeth Williams’ character takes in “Poltergeist,” to reclaim her daughter from the Other Side. There’s a scene with a psychic (a pale and spectral Geraldine Chaplin, looking like a Day of the Dead Catarina skeleton in Victorian dress) that also quite deliberately conjures up “Poltergeist.”

To describe this mother’s descent into the underworld as “bone-chilling” is not hyperbole. It’s just a starkly accurate description.

+ + +

An afterthought: Why are the sing-song rhymes and games of children so spooky? (One, two, Freddy’s coming for you. Three, four, better lock your door…)

This show could be your life

Jim Emerson

View image Judge Padma and Junior Chef (and Mad Molecular Gastronomist) Marcel, from Season 2, on location in Hawaii.

Because I enjoy the confessional aspect of blogging, I’m going to admit to you something shocking. It’s shocking to me, anyway. I have fallen under the spell of Bravo’s “Top Chef” program.

Here’s the thing: I don’t normally watch “reality shows” (though I saw the first few “Survivors” and the bizarre American debut season of “Big Brother”) and I don’t cook and I rarely eat in “fine dining” restaurants and I don’t know anything about food.

But I stumbled into one episode by accident, and that led to another, and then I ordered the first two seasons downloaded to my TiVo from Amazon Unbox and plowed through four or five episodes at a time into the wee hours of the morning. The damn show is like a bag of potato chips.

So, why have I gotten into this show so much? Well, for one thing, I like looking at and hearing about the pretty foods and how they got to be that way. (A friend of mine used to enjoy describing recent meals in loving detail. I called him “The Food Descripter” and he went on to work in a top San Francisco restaurant for a while, where writing the menus was one of his specialties.)

The format “is what it is,” to use a favorite expression of the competing cooks. The beats are as comfortable and familiar as those in a genre movie, and they don’t pretend to be anything else. (They also recycle the same few music cues again and again, just like early-’60s Godard and similarly irritating and addictive.)

But most of all, I think, I enjoy watching how the producers develop the characters and shape their relationships into “stories.” Every carefully cut line and selected mannerism — tics, gestures, glances — underlines (and in some cases I mean underlines) which role(s) the individual chefs are supposed to embody: The Outrageously Pretentious Sommelier-Diva-Geek, The Nervous Nelly, The Crunchy Granola Gal, The Egomaniacal Pest Who Annoys Everybody, The Big Sweet Lunk, The Betty Blue Unpredictably Temperamental Foreign Wacko Chick, The Hot-Headed Italian Bulldog Bully, The Mean Mean Bitch Bitch Queen, The Male Model-Lookalike Who Takes Everything Way Way Too Seriously Including Himself, and so on. And, of course, The Guy With The Hair. That one describes at least half the men on the show. I assume the hairdos are good attention-getters when everybody has to wear he same white jackets most of the time.

The cutaways are hilarious, emphasizing each cast member’s most memorable personality quirks over and over and over. The off-set interviews (a staple of MTV’s “The Real World” — oops, I also saw some of those, back in the ’90s) are chopped up like onions and sprinkled through the show. And sometimes they’re supposed to make you cry, too.

From Wasilla to Fargo: Sarah Palin in Rashomon

Jim Emerson

Michael Cera, on his decision to act in “Juno” (or “Juneau”):

“Well, I had a feeling when I took the part that something like that would happen, that Sarah Palin would run and her teen would be pregnant, and so I’m glad that it finally was fulfilled.”

☺☺☺☺

The Fargo Interview, with Marge Gunderson:

Gosh darn it, whether ya just love her or ya can’t stand her, there’s something about that Sarah Palin that’s got everybody talkin’ — whether it’s tryin’ to talk her kinda plain ol’ “Say it ain’t so, Joe Sixpack” Hockey Mom talk, or just tryin’ to figure out what the heck the gal is sayin’! Can ya tell what she thinks she means when she flaps that lipstick, or do ya just like the sparkle motion she makes when the words come out? Get back to me on that! Anyways, here we go again, with a buncha ways of looking at that Sarah Palin Talk that everybody’s talkin’ about:

Linguist Steven Pinker, “Everything You Heard Is Wrong,” New York Times, October 4, 2008:

Since the vice presidential debate on Thursday night, two opposing myths have quickly taken hold about Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. The first, advanced by her supporters, is that she made it through a gantlet of fire; the second, embraced by her detractors, is that her speaking style betrays her naïveté. Both are wrong. […]

But it would be unfair to question the authenticity of her accent or to use it as a measure of her intellect or sophistication. The dialect is certainly for real. Listeners who hear the Minnewegian sounds of the characters from “Fargo” when they listen to Ms. Palin are on to something: the Matanuska-Susitna Valley in Alaska, where she grew up, was settled by farmers from Minnesota during the Depression.

Happy Listmas! Year is Over (If You Want It)

Jim Emerson

“‘Pan’s Labyrinth” is the best movie of 2006. Right? Of course I’m right!”

I don’t disagree at all with Andy Horbal’s list of reservations about annual critics’ “Ten Best Lists.” Andy (host of the recent, too-marvelous-for-words Film Criticism Blog-a-Thon), sizes up the obvious shortcomings of such vain hierarchical endeavors:

The interest and the function of a list depends entirely on what the author decides to do with it and how well he or she explains that decision. This requires perspective: an awareness of what such a project can reasonably accomplish and what its significance in the larger film world is. It requires, for instance, a discussion of the films from the previous year that the critic saw in relation to the films that he or she missed. It definitely requires a discussion, as opposed to merely descriptions.Couldn’t agree more. When I was a full-time daily newspaper film critic, first in Seattle and then in LA, I saw virtually everything that was released (even stuff I didn’t review), which sometimes amounted to 200+ movies a year. These days, when I’m asked to do a Ten Best list, I always feel like I haven’t done my homework, because there’s just no way I can see even the stuff I think might be ten-best-worthy — which means I’m not likely to belatedly discover any surprises I haven’t already come across earlier in the year because I’m so busy cramming during the overloaded November-December movie season, including watching DVD releases and screeners from previous months’ releases. (How the hell did I ever do this in the years before home video, I wonder?) And I always try to provide a list of movies I haven’t seen — particularly when I’ve noticed they’ve been prized by critics and friends.

But we should acknowledge that there’s inevitably an element of serendipity at work in anybody’s movie year — above and beyond the choices made by international distribution and local exhibition companies. Would I have seen Ramin Bahrani’s “Man Push Cart” if I hadn’t been introduced to it at Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival in May? Would I have come to value Doug Block’s “51 Birch Street” so highly if I hadn’t seen it at the Toronto Film Festival in 2005, presented it at the 2006 Floating Film Festival, and then reviewed it for the Chicago Sun-Times more than a year after I’d first encountered it? Would I have chanced upon Neil Marshall’s “The Descent” if Roger hadn’t suffered complications from his surgery this summer and a friend (who’d watched the British DVD release) hadn’t suggested it was worth seeing when the Sun-Times was looking for reviews? Would I have overcome my resistance to seeing “Flags of Our Fathers” (those artsy monochromatic images in the trailer and TV spots really turned me off) if I hadn’t felt I needed to see it before making a ten best list? I have no way of knowing.

To me, a ten best list is like a personality inventory — a rough sketch of who I was (and what mattered to me most) during a particular year. (I used to participate in critics’ polls for music, too, but that’s even more overwhelming.) Reviews of new releases (written on deadline) have their limitations as film criticism, and so do lists, as Andy smartly details, but at their best they can be creative and illuminating and thoughtful — almost like critical haiku. This year, I’ll be doing at least three such lists, with different sets of criteria set by the editors: for MSN Movies, for the LA Weekly critics’ poll, and for myself, here at Scanners. Most of the lists will overlap, but I hope readers will find intriguing discoveries within them.

Never have I whined as much about making a ten best list as I did in 2006 — mainly because I felt like I had so much stuff to watch — and so little time. But before I present mine, let me offer a complementary list to Andy’s (and he mentions some of these things, too):

What Can Be Good About Ten Best Lists:

1) They force a critic to try (usually in vain) to summarize what he/she values in each movie on the list. That can make for a worthy — if almost impossibly difficult — writing challenge, for those who attempt to rise to it.

2) They pique readers’ interest in films they haven’t seen, didn’t want to see (boy, was I wrong about “Flags of Our Fathers” — more on that later), or didn’t like. Of course, that depends on how open a reader is to being persuaded, but my hope is that putting a title on my list will help some people make some exciting discoveries they might otherwise have missed.

3) They’re a handy way to evaluate the critic (even more than the year — which is an arbitrary consideration, anyway). Looking at somebody’s list can tell you something about a person’s taste and values — not unlike looking at somebody’s recent book, DVD, or music purchases. I don’t know about you, but those are the first things I check out when I go to somebody’s home for the first time. I dare say it’s at least as revealing (to me) as rummaging through their medicine cabinet or underwear drawer — and far more socially acceptable.

Yes, these lists are doomed, limited enterprises. And the number ten is almost arbitrary, although there are probably solid reasons we tend to think in groups of ten — reasons that have as much to do with Darwinian development (ten fingers — handy for counting!) as they do with our Arabic numeral system (where would we be without the introduction of the symbol for zero?). As enthusiasms wax and wane, you catch up with older movies from previous years, or you revisit movies you’ve listed and found them better, worse or different than you thought they were when you made your list, you may be tempted to revise your rankings. But that’s just part of the game (and it is just a game). A ten best list is simply a snapshot of what you’ve seen out of what was released in your area during a calendar year, and what you’ve found worthwhile at the time you make the list. That’s about it.

British film Philistines

Jim Emerson

No they didn’t. Did they?

Oh, those ignorant Brits! The Guardian recently published the results of its public poll for the “40 Greatest Foreign [sic] Films of All Time.” Of course, we love these silly consensus games because they offer such a terrific opportunity to express outrage. Like this fellow, who denounces his limey countrymen (and -women) for their cretinous taste in a letter to the editor:

Your list of the top 40 greatest foreign films, voted for by readers (Films and music, May 11), serves only to expose the paucity of foreign-language films in the UK, together with a chronic loss of knowledge or appreciation of cinema history. What we get is a hotchpotch of well-worn classics and recent international hits of dubious merit. Your film writers chide the voters too gently. There is only one silent film (“Battleship Potemkin”): no “Napoleon,” “Metropolis,” “Passion of Joan of Arc” or “The Last Laugh. ” Only one other title from before 1945 (Renoir’s “Régle du Jeu)”; and no room for Dreyer, Lang, Murnau, Gance, Vertov, Mizoguchi, Rossellini, Antonioni or Visconti (where is “The Leopard”?). Then to find Roberto Benigni’s inane and offensive “Life is Beautiful” included is the final insult.Clyde Jeavons

LondonYikes! Those Brits should be barred from the cinema! Why, if USA Today were to conduct such a poll, the results would be… probably very similar. (But how do you tell what language the actors are speaking in a silent film when the intertitles have been swapped out? Best Films Not Lip-Read in English?) I have a better idea. Let’s do a poll of the 40 best films of all time that were not made in any of the Romance Languages. Or how about the best films of all time in which nobody speaks Welsh. That ought to be comparably enlightening…

Opening Shots: ‘The Crying Game’

Jim Emerson

Enlarge image: Your eye just naturally alights on the figure to the right of the support…

Enlarge image: …who moves slowly along the shore in the opposite direction of the camera. (Here, the person is dead center in the frame.)

From Edward Copeland:

When Jim asked me to submit something about my favorite opening shot from a movie, I was at first flummoxed — it seemed all the best ones were obvious and would have been written on to death, so I dug through my memory to try to find a less-obvious choice.

What I settled on was “The Crying Game.” I was fortunate to see “The Crying Game” for the first time long before the hype about the “twist” kicked in, so I was genuinely surprised at the direction the film went in and I think, upon rewatching its opening, that the beginning was helpful to that end.

Percy Sledge’s great “When a Man Loves a Woman” plays on the soundtrack (the irony of that song will only sink in later) as the camera moves slowly under a bridge across a lake where on the other side sits an amusement park with Ferris wheels and various rides going round and round. If you had no idea going in where this film was headed, you certainly couldn’t have figured it out by these images, though you’d be mesmerized nonetheless.

Critics and ‘crackpots’

Jim Emerson

Photo from The Reeler: VanAirsdale and Zacharek on the right; Edelstein and Gleiberman on the left.

In other Contrarian News:

The Reeler (aka S.T. VanAirsdale) moderated a critics’ panel on the best and worst films of 2006 Wednesday in New York. The critics: David Edelstein (New York Magazine), Owen Gleiberman (Entertainment Weekly) and Stephanie Zacharek (Salon.com). According to The Reeler’s own account of the evening, Zacharek said, “…I think there is some sort of unspoken sort of pressure. Like, ‘If I put something really weird on there, people are just going to think I’m cracked.’ ” Writes VanAirsdale:

I couldn’t control myself. “Exactly!” I said. “So how long before we admit that Top 10s are completely intellectually bankrupt exercises?”

“I think what Stephanie has captured, though — if what (she’s) saying is true — is that these lists have become very political,” Gleiberman said. “But in a strange way; not in the way of people putting on these big commercial movies so they please their editors and to show that they’re on the side of the people. But even in picking idiosyncratic films, it’s films that all the critics kind of collude on deciding are good; therefore, maybe they can get away with putting those films on their list in terms of their editors. But the point is that they’re not reflecting 100 percent themselves. And I don’t get the idea of any critic who reflects anything other than himself. What’s the point of going into this profession? It’s not really that important anyway. I mean, it’s all about your own reaction. I think if you take that out of it, you’ve lost the reason for doing it.”

“That’s why you should all treasure the crackpots,” Edelstein told the crowd. “You know? Don’t look for the people who are just going to rubber-stamp the Oscar-winning movies. Seek out minority points of view — even insane points of view — that maybe will help you do some fresh thinking, because it’s amazing how easily we settle into this conventional wisdom. Even critics, in our splendid arrogance, I mean… I can’t tell you how lazy my thinking is and how often, and how I need great critics to shake me up. Like, you know, the people on this panel.”

OK, this exchange strikes me as peculiar (and a little disturbing) in several respects:

Everything that’s wrong with the world in two examples

Jim Emerson

View image Forget it, Jim. It’s Whatpassesfor- logicandreasonintheworld-town.

“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?”

— Robert Zimmerman, 1965

I do not believe that the greatest evil is done by people who necessarily think of themselves as evil. Because evil doesn’t often recognize itself. In “Chinatown,” Noah Cross says: “Most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of anything.” Implicit in this statement is his refusal to accept responsibility for what he has done. As he says, “I don’t blame myself.” There’s great truth in Cross’s words, and also in a corollary I’ll propose, which goes like this: “Most people refuse to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they can rationalize anything.” (See this post for more on that score.)

I think the most inherently “evil” person I’ve ever known, the one who did the most careless damage to people around him, was not a mere malevolent creep but someone who was pathologically clueless and could not conceive of anything or anyone beyond himself. He was a parasite, sucking the life blood out of those closest to him. His hosts — er, “friends” — eventually came to see that he considered them (if he considered them at all) insignificant — unintended consequences of himself — while people who knew him only casually (which was the best, and perhaps only, way to “know” him) thought he was just a really nice guy. He needed symbiotic relationships to feed his sense of self, and any harm to others as a result of his appetite was nothing more than acceptable collateral damage. If he was aware of it at all.

I see these patterns not only in everyday life, but in the behavior of governments, bureaucracies, businesses, public officials, and tyrants of all stripes. And I think it all comes down to that common quality of cluelessness — either obliviousness to the consequences of one’s words and actions or reckless disregard for them. Woody Allen (who, by the way, made a great movie about cluelessness, “Another Woman”) divided the world into the “horrible and the miserable.” For the sake of this essay, I would like to propose that we divide rampant worldwide insanity into Two Kinds of Cluelessness: 1) Literalism: Those who are certain they know something, but don’t know that they don’t understand it; and 2) Über-Solipsism Narcissism: Those who are certain they understand something, but but don’t know — and don’t care — that they don’t, because everything is only about them anyway.

I will always remember reading “Catch-22” at the tender age of 15, because I was already aware of this kind of insanity in people around me (family, friends, schoolmates, teachers, President Nixon and Vice President Agnew, the Watergate crew, and even — in my craziest moments — myself), but I’d never seen anybody else recognize it — and play with it — so hilariously. It was a huge catharsis for me, an acknowledgment of my pent-up frustrations, and I laughed until I cried and cried until I started laughing again.

Let me give you a pair of examples from the “Cinema Interruptus” I did with “Chinatown” in April at the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, CO. First, let me say it was a fantastic experience for me, and that the participants in the audience were inquisitive and incisive and generally brilliant, as always.

And then there were these other two…

Meshugene Men

Jim Emerson

Circumcised superheroes? Or mayo mavens? My favorite show is now kosher.

Sven Nykvist, 1922 – 2006

Jim Emerson

View image Sven Nykvist, behind the camera.

Roger Ebert interviewed the late master cinematographer Sven Nykvist in a fascinating visit to the set of “Face to Face” in 1975:

Sven Nykvist photographs Bergman’s films. He is tall, strong, fifty-one, with a beard and a quick smile. He is usually better-dressed than Bergman, but then almost everyone is; “Ingmar,” a friend says, “does not spend a hundred dollars a year for personal haberdashery.” Nykvist first worked for Bergman on ‘The Naked Night’ in 1953, and has been with him steadily since ‘The Virgin Spring’ in 1959. This will be his nineteenth title for Bergman, and the two of them together engineered Bergman’s long-delayed transition from black and white to color, unhappily in “All These Women” and then triumphantly in “A Passion of Anna” and “Cries and Whispers.”

Nykvist is in demand all over the world, and commands one of the half-dozen highest salaries among cinematographers, but he always leaves his schedule open for Bergman. “We’ve already discussed the new film the year before,” he says, “and then Ingmar goes to his island and writes the screenplay. The next year, we shoot — usually about the fifteenth of April. Usually we are the same eighteen people working with him, year after year, one film a year.”

At the Cannes Film Festival one year, he said, Bergman was talking with David Lean, the director of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Dr. Zhivago.” “What kind of crew do you use?” Lean asked. “I make my films with eighteen good friends,” Bergman said. “That’s interesting,” said Lean. “I make mine with 150 enemies.”

TIFF: Monsters

Jim Emerson

Take me to the river, drop me in the water…

“The Host” (or “Gue-mool,” which sounds better) is a South Korean monster movie in which a mutant amphibious creature swims beneath the Han River, scampers among the girders beneath its bridges, prowls its sewers, and occasionally leaps onto its banks to grab some human souvenirs. The creature is just doing whatever it’s bred — or mutated — to do, but the monsters who created it, and who mischaracterize the nature of the threat, thereby making the thing practically impossible to catch or contain, are Americans — portrayed as the world’s most aggressive exporter of bureaucratic incompetence and misinformation.

In the first scene, set in 2000, a U.S. military official in scrubs (Scott Wilson — setting the funny/horrific tone for the entire movie) directs a reticent Korean subordinate to empty potently toxic chemicals into the Han. After all, it’s a big river. By the end of the film, a Senate investigating committee finds that the U.S. bungled the whole thing, and then compounded the damage by covering it up. Imagine.

Of course, the lives affected by this particular adventure in imperialistic hysteria aren’t Americans, but Koreans — in particular, the comically fractured Park family whose patriarch runs a riverside refreshment stand. On the political as well as the horror/science-fiction level, this time it’s personal. The marvelous creature (part squid, part gecko, part salamander, part sandworm, part vagina dentata, created by San Francisco’s The Orphanage), snatches the youngest Park (a uniformed schoolgirl of 13), and the rest of the clan reunites to avenge her.

Director Bong Joon-ho shifts tones with quicksilver dexterity, cannily keeping the audience (and the film) just on the edge of losing its balance and splashing into the Han. Humor turns to horror and back again in a flash, while generic requirements are both fulfilled and cleverly overturned. Even the pathos works, because it’s a little bit cock-eyed. How does the movie do all this? Must be something in the water…